Bug Squad Automated Testing Team

From Joomla! Documentation

Automated testing is a key technology that we will incorporate into the workings of JBS. At the present, this is a somewhat specialized skill, so we will start by developing a separate team of people who are familiar with this and can help write automated tests and train other JBS members on automated testing. Our aim is to eventually make automated testing a routine part of fixing issues.

Contents

News and Updates

2010 05 24 document created.

2010 05 27 document updated with General Procedure & Goals section.

Overview

Automated testing is a key technology being incorporated into the workings of JBS. At the present, this is a somewhat specialized skill, and a team of people who are familiar with this will help write automated tests and train other JBS members on automated testing. Our aim is to eventually make automated testing a routine part of fixing issues.

To follow the analogy from the Bug_Squad_Coding_Team doc, if the Bug Squad was run like a hospital, then the Automated Testing Team is like your doctor whom you see for your a regular checkup just to make sure everything is fine. If something is found not be quite right, we'll send you to see a specialist to get checked out and treated.

General Procedure & Goals

As of this writing, the system test suite is run a daily basis in conjunction with the nightly build. The individual tests and test suite can also be run manually on an end-user's workstation. When they are run, failures and errors will be displayed at the end of the test, if there are any. These failures and errors will indicate where changes, regressions, bugs or other issues may have occurred. The person running the test(s) can then investigate whether the issue(s) stemmed from a bug or a programmatic change. Programmatic changes (i.e. renaming "jformparent_id" to "jform_parent_id") generally occur quite often during development and beta stages and are corrected on the test level.

Ultimately, our goal is to have a system test submitted with each patch. Each submitted system test can be integrated into the test suite and ensure future functionality and prevent regressions. Please see Writing_System_Tests_for_Version_1.6 for more information.

System & Unit Testing

Automated Testing is comprised of two types of tests, System and Unit Tests. System test simulate and test what a user may experience where as Unit tests check individual blocks of source code.